New online game turns mild-mannered Vancouver pedestrians into virtual warriors

Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun06.10.2013

Tim Bray (right), who uses the online name Bengalrune, engages Richard Smith (“Smirby”), a SFU communications professor and director of The Center for Digital Media, in battle while playing the virtual game “Ingress” at the Great Northern Way campus in Vancouver, June 9th, 2013.Stuart Davis
/ PNG

Tim Bray (right), who uses the online name Bengalrune, engages Richard Smith (“Smirby”), a SFU communications professor and director of The Center for Digital Media, in battle while playing the virtual game “Ingress” at the Great Northern Way campus in Vancouver, June 9th, 2013.Stuart Davis
/ PNG

Tim Bray (right), who uses the online name Bengalrune, engages Richard Smith (“Smirby”), a SFU communications professor and director of The Center for Digital Media, in battle while playing the virtual game “Ingress” at the Great Northern Way campus in Vancouver, June 9th, 2013.Stuart Davis
/ PNG

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If you happened to see Richard Smith walking by Vancouver’s Science World, you might think he’s just a mild-mannered professor on his way to work at the nearby Centre for Digital Media.

But lurking under that innocent facade is a warrior who is battling on Ingress, a new massively multi-player online game that has Vancouverites lurking around statues and landmarks, using their smartphones to hack portals, throw up shields and fire blasters.

For fun.

Not the purview of your stereotypical gamer, Ingress is attracting players like Smith and his wife who have turned their evening dog-walking into strategic forays aimed at seizing control back from the Resistance — they’re the blue team — and advancing the domination of their green team in the neighbourhood.

The game is still in testing, with game invitations hotly sought after. But there are several hundred people in Vancouver playing, identifying themselves to each other in public with their version of a secret handshake – flashing their phone screen.

“Ingress is not just online, it is everywhere,” said Smith, director of the Centre for Digital Media and a Simon Fraser University communication professor. “Maybe it is a massively multiplayer everywhere game — an MMEG,” he said with a laugh, playing on the acronym MMOG.

“People distinguish between ‘in real life’ — IRL and online — but I think that is a nonsensical division. There is no online/real-life division in Ingress.

“The game is only possible when you’re outside and running around the city and only when you have a smartphone or tablet that’s connected to the Internet.”

It’s a world of augmented reality where heritage buildings and other landmarks may not be as they seem, but portals to be won and lost in an elaborate and unfolding game created by Niantic Labs, a division of Google.

The storyline behind the game has the Enlightened Ones, the green team, on the side of extraterrestrial Shapers, who have seeded the globe with ‘exotic matter’ the green team believes will enlighten and advance all mankind. The blue team is the Resistance, fighting to protect humans from the Shapers.

It is a game that is engaging hundreds of thousands of people around the globe and maybe more following Smith’s talk on Ingress at Saturday’s Northern Voice blogging and social media conference in Vancouver.

Smith’s foray into Ingress began as many of his tech explorations do — just checking out yet another new advance in the digital world.

But five months later, he has risen to the game’s highest level, Level 8, and he and his wife have become seasoned players on the green team. An Ingress player could be your neighbour, circling by the same coffee shop over and over again. It could be the woman seeming to be reading a plaque as you walk by.

How do you recognize an Ingress player on Vancouver’s streets? Flashing the screen of their Android phone or tablet in your direction reveals the Ingress game app in progress and signals you have met a fellow geek.

“It is a genre of game called capture the flag,” said Smith. “In this case they’re portals. The backstory is that a new form of energy has been discovered in the world and it seems to cluster around portals, portals have the ability to change the way people think.

“The blue team, the Resistance, thinks it’s a bad thing and should be extinguished. The Enlightened, the green team, think it’s a good thing and should be enhanced.

“They (the game creators) write an interesting story in a kind of science fiction way. The storyline is important but most of the people I know who play the game are not terribly fussed about the story that goes behind it.”

Google has chosen mainly public art and public buildings as their early portals. In Vancouver, the murals on Commercial Drive where the road curves before it turns into Victoria are each a portal. It could be a fire hall, the post office, a statue or a painting. The game also lets you submit a portal.

It’s a social game, where online chat extends to the outdoor playing field with team members meeting up or players recognizing from game activity that another Ingress player is nearby and trying to identify them.

“I play with my wife, a lot of couples play together,” said Smith. “You meet people walking out together with their phones in front of them.

“The pace of the game is such that you can actually walk and talk, it’s not like you’re blowing up zombies and your spouse says, ‘don’t talk to me I’m killing zombies here.’”

Since you have to be in the vicinity of a portal to do anything, the game gets you off the couch.

“You just walk from place to place, engage in some sort of little battle by exploding things and so on or you can do what they call farming, you accumulate items that are useful for you in the game,” said Smith.

It has been good for Smith’s exercise regimen and no doubt the family dogs are happy with the extended walks.

“It used to take me 20 minutes to walk to work but now it takes 40 minutes because I walk around Science World,” said Smith. “I track my walking and I had the biggest week last week — 116 kilometres.”

Tim Bray, a Vancouver tech veteran who moved from Google’s Android team last year to the company’s Identity group, where he’s working on OpenID and other initiatives, is another top level Ingress player in Vancouver.

In a recent blog post, he described meeting up with some Ingress players on a trip to San Francisco. In what could be a new take on tourism, it sounds like a scene from a James Bond film:

“SteveMcQ and I ran like hell through the beautifully-manicured grounds, leaping hedges, terrifying poodles, banking around corners. For the last 100 yards we had our Androids out, firing off L8 bursters fast as we could punch the screen,” wrote Bray.

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New online game turns mild-mannered Vancouver pedestrians into virtual warriors

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